There are currently 625 Ubuntu Members and at least 32 of them are women, which means over 5% of Ubuntu Members are women!

We hate turning people into numbers, but late last year it was decided by the Ubuntu Women Project that we’d start tracking metrics of the percentage of women who are Ubuntu Members. This tracking was launched by Alan Bell and bases criteria of gender upon: self-identification, use of public resources (wiki pages, public blogs), and our own public knowledge from meeting each other at UDS and other conferences (there very well may even be more women working in our midst who have not chosen to disclose their gender in public).

Why is 5% important? Back in 2006 the oft-cited FLOSSPOLS declared that only about 1.5% of FLOSS community members were female. A poll in the Ubuntu forums community around the same time came back with a number of 2.4%. We have since launched Ubuntu Women and worked hard to support and encourage women who come to us to become more involved with the the project, and then to make that step to Membership when they were ready. It’s exciting to see the numbers improve over the years, and I hope that the Ubuntu Women Project can continue to make a difference moving forward, eventually driving itself to obsolescence.

Of course Ubuntu Women didn’t help all 5% of these women. In my past few years of involvement I’ve been seeing more women becoming involved with the community on their own, and today there is a large number women who work on Ubuntu who have never been involved with Ubuntu Women at all. It’s exciting to watch Ubuntu become a more inclusive community and to see the passion and support of new people joining from existing community members overcome (or negate) many of the barriers that may have been problems in the past.

Interested in the project? If you want to help out or are interested yourself, head over to ubuntu-women.org to learn more.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 2nd, 2010 at 2:04 pm and is filed under tech, ubuntu planet. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.

There are lots of reasons (and books and papers on the subject), but a major one is that women aren’t exposed to Linux and Open Source in the same way that men are – frequently we aren’t exposed at all.

Once exposed it’s rarely with someone who presents it in a way that attracts our interest as a hobby.

I think people are comparing apples and oranges here. 5% of all members of a group called Ubuntu are female, while 28% of what “According to the same FLOSSPOLS report, the number in the proprietary software world is 28%” are female?? Is there a group called “Proprietary Software”? No. Do people of both sexes have to use the software that their jobs supply? Yes. So there is no correlation for this metric.

But congratulations to the 625 member Ubuntu group for drawing more women into their group.

But I would say that there are more Linux users percentage wise who are women than 5%. I have no data to back that up.

I’m delighted Ubuntu has a higher than average participation among women, but still 5% is much lower than proportion of of females using Windows, which would be closer to 50%. It’s a shame because some of the most interesting articles I’ve read about Linux on the net have been written by women. And when I discuss Ubuntu, Linux and open source with women, I am usually greeted with puzzlement.

But all the same, do keep up the good work. And I’ll definitely crack open the champagne when the figure reaches 25%.

@Robert, well this is measuring something slightly different to the user population, this is of the 625 people who have made a significant and sustained contribution to Ubuntu and have been recognised by the community through the membership process. Reaching the 5% milestone is great news, but it certainly isn’t the end of the story, double figures would be great. I think it should end up in the long term at somewhere above 20% which is the proportion of CompSci graduates.

I don’t think men are more exposed to Linux. I had to get it on my own. It’s your fault and a fault of society. Women are not as good in technology as men. That’s what the society thinks. If you think so you will not be exposed, because of that concept. No one stops you from browsing the web and searching. I had to do that.